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>> I think we should judge plants and animals by behavior and
>> properties not by point of origin. In general, when a plant is
>> invasive it is because there is some underutilized resource that
>> happens to meet their (its) requirements.
>> Yt, DW
About 3 weeks ago on Nature NS, I objected to this off-the-cuff idea of Dave
Webster's, given in the last sentence above: that invasive (plant) species
exploit niches that are un- or under-utilized by native species, so they don't
really compete with the natives. I argued instead the biological party line
that the invaders usually displace native species and take over a niche,
sometimes doing major damage because of a lack of parasites and
predators which
got left behind in the old country. At least sometimes this seems to be true.
UPDATE: a recent New York Times article, 9 September 2008 in the
science section
("Friendly Invaders" by Carl Zimmer) reports on a recent publication in the
journal PNAS that in fact argues in favour of Dave's view. In a number of
examples, diversity has increased historically without the ousting of native
species, supporting the idea (surprising to me) that there must be many
underutilized niches that the invaders can slot into. Not all the people
consulted bought the idea, but if you are interested in the topic, the NYT
article is worth consulting.
In case anyone on NNS doesn't know, you can subscribe to NYT-electronic for
free. This gets you a ~55 kbyte daily listing of many of their articles sent
by e-mail, which you then can open and read on-line, one by one.
Steve
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